YSTV Archive

A slightly grand term for a pile of mixed format tapes. YSTV has video archive material dating back to the mind 1970s at the moment, although we can't play anything older than about 1984. Any contributions of material, or help accessing older formats would be greatly appreciated. In total 7 analogue and 3.5 digital formats are represented in the archive.

Legacy Formats

These are formats that we are not adding to, and hope eventually to transfer to more accessible and durable formats. The urgency of these transfers depends on the durability of the source and the availability of suitable machines to play the archive tapes.

IVC 1" Open Reel

Current tapes dated between about 1975 and 1980. 10 inch (2400 foot long) metal reels of 1 inch wide video tape. Marked simply I.V.C. and a tape number, from which I presume they were recorded on an International Video Corporation machine. Luckily all the 1" IVC machines are supposed to be compatible in terms of on-tape format, so we don't need to know which was used to record it. GTV in Birmingham are believed to have a working IVC700, efforts have started to see if we can get the tapes to it and extract the contents.

Sony Rover Open Reel

These have similar dates to the IVC tapes, but are shorter 5 inch spools of 1/2 inch tape. Marked only as Sony Rover, they are presumed to come from one of the widespread Sony portable machines of the date, most of which conformed to the EIJA standard and so had interchangeable tapes. Stoic have one of these machines, but it doesn't work. Negotiations to try and get it working and in use are ongoing - they managed to dub their archive to Umatic before it gave out.

Current Formats

These are used for current contributions to the archive. The aim is that they should be as durable and widely playable as possible for the future, whilst also preserving decent picture quality in a reasonable amount of space.